Our Need to Know at All Time

Our need to know things is impossible to satisfy.

If you are more inspired by logic (like me), then understanding why it’s impossible in theory is crucial. So that’s where I’m going to start.

The Law of Impermanence states that everything in existence is transitory. In other words, every experience, whether good or bad, is fleeting. And due to their fleeting nature, it’s impossible to ever know – without question – what’s real. The only thing we can know for certain is that we don’t know everything.

When we make our need to know right or wrong (i.e. try to control that need to know) we experience resistance with not knowing. We create a duality, making knowing right and not knowing wrong. And by the same token, we assume that feelings or thoughts that go against what we “know” we should be feeling are assumed to be wrong or an error.

We’re judging that what we know of ourselves, our own inner truth – especially if it goes against what has been defined for us as “good” – is wrong.

But how is it wrong if our bodily experience is real? What if the experience we are having is here to teach us something?

Whether painful or pleasurable, our experience is the way for us to find our truth.

The pleasurable experience is never the issue. But our initial instinct is to resist and reject the painful experiences, because they bring up emotions such as shame, guilt, or fear. Attached to those experiences is a core belief we have that negatively affects our self-worth, so we try to escape it. But in suppressing it, we suppress the emotion itself, and therefore our truth that lies behind it.

But emotions don’t exist as good or bad; they are fleeting, non-permanent. Everything exists as part of a whole, and is co-created for you, by you and with you.

So, from this perspective, our urge to know at all times comes from our inability to hold and get curious about the painful emotions; the inability to truly know ourselves.